Notes on Chapter 1 of by "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary" by N. Katherine Hayles
- "To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all." (3)
- In the definition of digital literature offered by the Electronic Literature Organization, the phrase "work with an important literary aspect" seemed far more uncertain than whatever digital definitions might be imposed (she goes on to address this herself in the next paragraph, going on to define it "as creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper."
- Genres:
FIRST GENERATION (UNTIL 1995): HYPERTEXT
- Hypertext fiction characterized by linking structures (written using Storyspace, the tool of choice in the late 1980s and 1990s, now eclipsed due to limitations related to web transfer)
- Culminating work: Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl"
SECOND GENERATION: NETWORK FICTION
- Later works with more complex navigational schemes and interface metaphors
- "Network Fiction" defined as digital fiction that "makes use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinatory narratives" (8).
INTERACTIVE FICTION
- Stronger game elements (in a game, "the user interprets in order to configure, whereas in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret")
- Interactive fictions alternate game play with novelistic components
- Repeated emphasis on "interactor" rather than "user" or "reader"
THE IMAGINING OF THREE DIMENSIONS INTERACTIVELY ON THE SCREEN
- Several of the items mentioned, including Ted Warnell's TLT vs. LL and David Knoebel's "Heart Pole" sounded fascinating, but the links I could find on-line to the Iowa Writer Web were broken and I couldn't track down either text.
IMMERSION IN ACTUAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACES
- Site-specific mobile works... The Missing Voice - listen to sections keyed to different London inner city locations
- CAVE texts requiring virtual reality goggles and manipulation of a wand - this equipment costs upward of $1 million dollars and requires willingness to allow creative writers time with traditionally scientific equipment
- Interactive dramas - I downloaded Facade and would like to try it later. This quote caught my attention: "How to maintain conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction" (16).
GENERATIVE ART - whereby an algorithm is used either to generate texts according to a randomized scheme or to scramble and rearrange preexisting texts (owing a debt to William Burroughs's notion of the "cut up" and "fold in")
CREOLE combining human-only language and machine-readable code
- "To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all." (3)
- In the definition of digital literature offered by the Electronic Literature Organization, the phrase "work with an important literary aspect" seemed far more uncertain than whatever digital definitions might be imposed (she goes on to address this herself in the next paragraph, going on to define it "as creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper."
- Genres:
FIRST GENERATION (UNTIL 1995): HYPERTEXT
- Hypertext fiction characterized by linking structures (written using Storyspace, the tool of choice in the late 1980s and 1990s, now eclipsed due to limitations related to web transfer)
- Culminating work: Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl"
SECOND GENERATION: NETWORK FICTION
- Later works with more complex navigational schemes and interface metaphors
- "Network Fiction" defined as digital fiction that "makes use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinatory narratives" (8).
INTERACTIVE FICTION
- Stronger game elements (in a game, "the user interprets in order to configure, whereas in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret")
- Interactive fictions alternate game play with novelistic components
- Repeated emphasis on "interactor" rather than "user" or "reader"
THE IMAGINING OF THREE DIMENSIONS INTERACTIVELY ON THE SCREEN
- Several of the items mentioned, including Ted Warnell's TLT vs. LL and David Knoebel's "Heart Pole" sounded fascinating, but the links I could find on-line to the Iowa Writer Web were broken and I couldn't track down either text.
IMMERSION IN ACTUAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACES
- Site-specific mobile works... The Missing Voice - listen to sections keyed to different London inner city locations
- CAVE texts requiring virtual reality goggles and manipulation of a wand - this equipment costs upward of $1 million dollars and requires willingness to allow creative writers time with traditionally scientific equipment
- Interactive dramas - I downloaded Facade and would like to try it later. This quote caught my attention: "How to maintain conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction" (16).
GENERATIVE ART - whereby an algorithm is used either to generate texts according to a randomized scheme or to scramble and rearrange preexisting texts (owing a debt to William Burroughs's notion of the "cut up" and "fold in")
CREOLE combining human-only language and machine-readable code